Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman shares some uses of the term “Chupacabras” before it was made popular in 1995, “Chupacabras 1951“. Quoting Kenneth Thomas:

…watching the 1951 movie Bride of the Gorilla with Raymond Burr and Lon Chaney. Burr gets poisoned by a witch and either starts becoming a gorilla or it’s all in his mind and he’s running around naked at night in a South American jungle. The natives are convinced that it’s a legendary beast called something like a “sucaris.” (It was hard to tell from the dialect.) When they describe the legendary beast they are quite clearly describing a Chupacabras. The verbal descriptions were a match. When they decide to set a trap for it, they use a live goat as bait. They do bring a goat to the trap they set for the creature.

Coleman also mentions the birds called “goatsuckers” in Spanish, of the Caprimulgiformes order, which means literally goat-sucker in Latin. According to Mexican researcher Luis Ruiz Noguez work on the Chupacabras, those birds are indeed called popularly goatsuckers in Spanish, but the actual term used is “Chotacabras”.

“Choto” or “Chota” is the name given to the goat offspring when it’s sucking milk, and the popular (and erroneous) legend is that these birds are able to open their beaks so wide they could suck milk not only from goats, but from cows as well.

But the relationship between the Chotacabras birds and the Chupacabras is more interesting than a mere similarity of names and alleged behaviour, because the main promoter of the Chupacabras in 1995 was also involved on one Chotacabras case some years before.

In 1989, Puerto Rican Jorge J. Martín promoted the case of a bird with snake-like fangs allegedly found and captured by relatives of María Ortiz Hernández while they were fishing. It was promoted as the “serpent-bird of Gurabo“, and if you may wonder where such chimera idea would have come from, you just have to read how it was immediately related to the Quetzalcoatl legend.

Much was made of the creature, which was available for examination, until one policeman visited the house where it was preserved, grabbed the creature and removed its fangs. They were merely parts from the feet of a rooster, attached to a common bird’s beak.

Perhaps more importantly to our post here, the bird was a chotacabras.

And you can actually see some later drawings of the Chupacabras where it also has big fangs and wings.

So, as Noguez pointed out, you can add the “serpent-bird of Gurabo” hoax involving a Chotacabras to the predecessors of the Chupacabras mania that swept the world around ten years ago. According to the Mexican researcher, the term “Chupacabras” is a simplistic and erroneous use of the more widely known term Chotacabras.

Oh well. I was almost forgetting. While you will probably not find any use of the exact term “Chupacabras” in the Bible, Spanish or otherwise, you will find the term “Chotacabras”, according to Luis Noguez. And it’s related to Lilith. Another kind of mythic vampire.